To Publishers: Stop Whining!

Wednesday

Jul 31, 2013 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2013 at 1:52 PM

Yesterday President Barack Obama visited an Amazon distribution center in Tennessee and the reaction from the publishing/retail booksellers was immediate. The purpose of the President’s visit was to promote jobs in the industry and Amazon worked the opportunity to the max. In a press release issued the day before, Amazon.com stated that it is “adding 7,000 jobs in 13 states, beefing up staff at the warehouses where it fills orders, and in its customer service division. ….and that it will add 5,000 full-time jobs at its U.S. distribution centers, which currently employ about 20,000 workers who pack and ship customer orders. “

Publishers Weekly, the premier publication for both the publishing and book industries, issued a somewhat tetchy story entitled Does President Obama Hate Indie Bookstores? Quoting several tweets from booksellers around the country, PW labels this visit “a slap in the face” to booksellers.

The American Bookseller’s Association published its own open letter to the President calling his Amazon visit “greatly misguided.” The letter states: “While Amazon may make news by touting the creation of some 7,000 new warehouse jobs (many of which are seasonal), what is woefully underreported is the number of jobs its practices have cost the economy. For you to highlight Amazon as a job creator strikes us as greatly misguided. As you’ve noted so often, small businesses are the engines of the economy. When a small business fails and closes its doors, this has a ripple effect at both a local and a national level. Jobs are lost, workers lose healthcare and seek unemployment insurance, and purchasing decreases.”

For publishers to whine and plead foul in light of its unceasing pressure on libraries vis a vis the purchasing of ebooks strikes me as irony in the extreme. First, there was the limit on libraries’ circulation of ebooks to no more than 26 checkouts before they vaporized. HarperCollins was the initial villain in that scenario. Then there were the extortionate book purchase charges which applied only to libraries and not the consumer market. So when publishers suddenly shout ‘treachery’ when the President applauds Amazon, I can only sniff and mutter “what goes around, comes around.”